One of loneliest places in all of McLean County is the Poor Farm
Cemetery located about five miles south of downtown Bloomington.
This one-acre plot serves as the final resting place for several
hundred unfortunate souls. Beginning around 1879 and into the early
1930s, those buried included the penniless, the neglected, the
mentally ill and physically disabled, as well as vagrants struck
and killed by freight trains, unidentified murder victims and
abandoned newborns.

Today, this “potter’s field” is isolated, unkempt and rarely
visited, a setting somehow illustrative of the many unhappy
circumstances surrounding the lives and deaths of those buried
there.

Established in 1860 under the auspices of the Board of
Supervisors (the precursor to the County Board), the McLean County
Poor Farm cared for those unable to care for themselves. This
institution eventually consisted of 350-plus acres of prime
farmland, with a 20-acre site just west of U.S. 51 home to the
superintendent’s quarters, housing for the “inmates” (as residents
were called well into the 20th century) and various
outbuildings.

At the Poor Farm, the able-bodied were expected to lend a hand
bailing hay, gardening, milking, canning and the like. Less than a
decade after the end of World War II, the cluster of buildings
became the county-run Maple Grove Nursing Home, which remained in
operation into the 1970s.

Back in 1879, the county decided to establish of a pauper’s
cemetery on the Poor Farm grounds, and an acre just west of the
buildings was set aside for that purpose. From the beginning, the
cemetery interred not only Poor Farm residents, but also those from
the wider world who had no recourse to a proper burial.

Today, the cemetery is a scrubby square of green in the middle
of a plowed field just southeast of the county’s Animal Control
Center on County Road North 1375 E. Road/Morris Avenue, and west of
the still-standing superintendent’s house. County workers mow the
grass and weeds every so often, and a few windswept trees are all
that serve as ornamentation.

Prior to the opening of this “God’s acre,” it’s presumed most
Poor Farm residents and other down-on-their-luck folk were laid to
rest at the free ground sections of what is now Evergreen Memorial
Cemetery.

At the county farm, the dead were placed in plain wooden caskets
in graves often dug by fellow residents. The earlier markers were
probably wood slats, though later graves featured concrete slabs
adorned with nothing but a number — no names, dates of birth and
death, or epitaphs. In 1930, Poor Farm Superintendent Arthur Jones
(who served in that position from 1913 to 1933) said the cemetery
featured 173 graves with concrete slabs and more than 300 others
without the benefit of such markers.

Each grave offers a sad story unto itself. “The death of Miss
Kate Dagon occurred at the Poor Farm at 8 o’clock Sunday night,”
read a brief Pantagraph notice of May 10, 1892.

“She had been blind for about 20 years and was one of the oldest
inmates [around 75 years of age] of the county house.”

On Nov. 28, 1891, the partially decomposed body of an
unidentified male was found in a cornfield east of Bloomington.
Foul play was suspected because there were cuts to the head and
under the chin.

Like so many others laid to rest in the cemetery, no one claimed
this John Doe.

Poor Farm resident “Big Henry” Coolidge was buried on March 20,
1899. He’d spent 12 years as a ward of the county, and his nickname
came from the fact he weighed something like 325 pounds. “It was
impossible to obtain a coffin large enough for him,” The Pantagraph
noted, “and he was interred in a specially constructed box and in a
grave double the usual size.”

On May 22, 1915, an unidentified man about 50 years old wearing
a dark suit threw himself in front of a Big Four (the Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway) freight train several
miles east of Bloomington.

The next day his remains were buried at the Poor Farm.

One of the last known burials at this saddest of cemeteries was
made in the fall of 1930 when the body of an unidentified newborn,
perhaps murdered by a blow to the head, was found at the
Bloomington city dump. “Slain Baby’s Body Given Number and Buried
in County Farm Grave,” read the Sept. 8 Pantagraph headline.

The infant’s concrete slab simply read “165.”

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